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Guanxi is the foundation of business success in Chinese and other Eastern cultures, but little is known about the extent to which guanxi influences brand outcomes in channel relationships. The purpose of this study is to propose a novel theoretical framework of interpersonal and interorganizational guanxi relationships in a sales channel context and how these relationships influence brand outcomes.

The authors conceptualize, develop and validate new scales measuring interpersonal and interorganizational guanxi and test the proposed model with a field study to validate the effects of guanxi on brand loyalty. The causal relationships between interpersonal guanxi and brand attitudes and affect are confirmed in a separate field experiment.

Findings show that interpersonal guanxi is antecedent to interorganizational guanxi, and these two constructs have significant and differential direct and indirect effects on brand attitudes, brand affect and brand loyalty.

New multidimensional scales measuring both interpersonal and interorganizational guanxi were developed. Both interpersonal and interorganizational guanxi are conceptualized as second-order reflective constructs measured by the reflective first-order guanxi elements of personal and firm trust, personal and firm long-term orientation, xinyong (integrity), reciprocity, interaction and face.

Motivated by the apparent presence of the “productivity paradox” of information technology (IT) in agri-food supply chain (SC), the purpose of this paper is to explore how IT capabilities affect agri-food supply chain performance (SCP). Specifically, this paper investigates the direct and indirect impacts of IT capabilities on agri-food SCP through interorganizational relationships.

This paper employs the questionnaire survey method based on relevant literatures. Data are collected from Chinese 265 core firms' agri-food SC. Structural equation modelling (SEM) is mainly employed for hypothesis testing and analysis.

The main findings are as follows. First, IT capabilities have significant direct impact on agri-food SCP. Second, IT capabilities enhance interorganizational relationships in the agri-food SC. Third, interorganizational relationships positively influence agri-food SCP. Last, interorganizational relationships are important path factors and mediate the indirect impact of IT capabilities on agri-food SCP.

This research is limited to a particular sample, that is, agriculture-related firms in Chinese agri-food SC. The results need to be generalized to encompass wider samples. Future research could in greater detail study the links among IT capabilities, interorganizational relationships and agri-food SCP.

The study's findings could provide practical reference value for agriculture-related firms to design appropriate strategies to solve the IT “productivity paradox” and improve agri-food SCP from the perspectives of IT capabilities and interorganizational relationships.

This paper constructs a newly developed framework based on the resource-based view (RBV) and relational view to examine the links among IT capabilities, interorganizational relationships and agri-food SCP, and innovatively verifies the mediating effect of interorganizational relationships on the impact of IT capabilities on agri-food SCP.

Adopting aspects of the resource-based perspective and interorganizational relational dynamics, this paper examines the notion of resource transformation in the reconstitution of broken interorganizational relationships.

Following a qualitative approach, the research involved four in-depth case studies of buyer–supplier relationships among 12 Scandinavian manufacturing firms.

The results suggest that reconstituting broken interorganizational relationships, whether overlooked or underutilized, can pose important consequences for resource transformations. To adapt in dynamic environments, firms use resources in new combinations, and various relationship-specific resources may be difficult, if not impossible, to transform independent of the reconstitution process. Such resource transformations can occur when competencies in reconstituting interorganizational relationships are combined to synthesize novel resources or recombined with other resources. Four identified types of resource transformations in reconstitution processes – in production facilities, products, human know-how and coordination of interorganizational collaboration – can occur in each firm and/or in the interorganizational relationship.

Although the explorative multiple-case study approach afforded novel insights, the findings have no representative or generalizable implications in any positivist sense and thus warrant careful interpretation. Nevertheless, they make important contributions to the literature and illuminate promising avenues for future research, which should involve additional data collection and quantitative studies.

As firms reconstitute broken interorganizational relationships, the transformation of their resources can provide new, expected resources capable of generating substantial benefits.

This paper fills an identified gap in research regarding how reconstituting broken interorganizational relationships influence the transformation of resources. The paper provides new conceptual and empirical insights as well as makes several contributions to the literature on the topic.

This study aims to analyze the effects of interorganizational cost management and opportunism on the reflexes of relational norms on satisfaction with interorganizational cooperation in franchised companies. The collective synergy arising from these relationships mainly seeks to increase competitiveness and commercial development. Windolph and Moeller observed that interorganizational cost management increases satisfaction in the relationship with partners, while relational norms attenuate the negative effect on supplier satisfaction.

A survey was carried out with managers of franchised companies in the food industry. The managers were identified on the social network Linkedin. After that, an invitation was sent to participate in the research. A total of 88 valid responses were obtained. The questionnaire consists of 40 extracted assertions. A pre-test was carried out to verify the comprehensibility of the wording of the assertions. Structural equation modeling with partial least squares (PLS-SEM) was used for data analysis. For analysis, validation and adequacy tests of the model were carried out, and executed in the software SmartPLS.

Survey results reveal that interorganizational cost management increases franchisor relationship satisfaction. Relational social norms mitigate the negative effect of opportunism on satisfaction with cooperation. And interorganizational cost management plays an important role in the relationship between relational norms and satisfaction with cooperation between franchisor and franchisees.

However, limitations resulting from the methodological design of the research must be considered in the interpretation of the results, at the same time that they provide opportunities for new research. As for the methodological aspects, the study cannot be generalized to other branches of companies, because it is a sector with franchises with specific characteristics. It should also be considered that the study was limited to investigating the proposed model, but other constructs can be observed in the literature. Finally, to empirically assess the constructs of the theoretical model, research instruments from studies other than those considered here can be used.

This study contributes with relevant literature and the management practice of interorganizational cooperation by empirically demonstrating the importance of interorganizational cost management as a management control mechanism and to mitigate the effects of opportunism between franchisor and franchisees.

It also contributes to the inclusion of social norms in the relationship between franchisor and franchisees with a view to increasing franchisee satisfaction with their franchisor, which also aims to mitigate the impacts of opportunism in this relationship. It contributes to the social order, as they reveal ways to mitigate possible conflicts between franchisor and franchisee and generate greater transparency in the relationship.

This study is justified by the fact that it investigates relational aspects of cooperation between franchisor and franchisees, a form of interorganizational cooperation that is growing in the market. It is also justified by highlighting the importance of interorganizational cost management as a means of mitigating the opportunistic effects between franchisor and franchisees, proving to be an important management mechanism. Research is especially important because interorganizational strategies have been spreading in corporate environments (Dekker, Ding & Groot, 2016) and the maintenance of the relationship is dependent on satisfaction with cooperation.

Trust, as one of the core components of a relationship, has attracted research attention from many disciplines. From the perspective of IT outsourcing, this paper aims to divide trust into two levels, interpersonal trust and interorganizational trust, and explore the effects of these two levels of trust on knowledge sharing and IT outsourcing success.

Based on social exchange theory and the theory of organization boundary systems, a theoretical model was developed and tested empirically with the responses to a cross‐sectional survey. Data were collected from key informants of 143 firms that had outsourced at least part of their IT functions.

The data analysis results showed that interpersonal trust plays a more dominant role than does interorganizational trust in making IT outsourcing successful and the extent of knowledge sharing has a significant mediating effect between interpersonal trust and IT outsourcing success.

From the managerial perspective, findings from this study once again emphasize the importance of relationship management (trust and knowledge sharing) on overall IT outsourcing success. Paying attention to interpersonal trust is an effective way for an organization to build and maintain a successful IT outsourcing relationship with its service provider.

The paper aims to examine how trust interacts with factors affecting interorganizational knowledge sharing in green supply chains, where cooperation and competition coexist.

A new research model is developed which comprises nine constructs and 13 research hypotheses, with trust as a mediating construct. The nine constructs are measured by well‐supported measures in the literature. The hypotheses are tested on data collected from 288 major green manufacturing firms in Taiwan, using structural equation modeling.

The paper finds that trust is the pivot of the factors influencing interorganizational knowledge sharing. The more a factor contributes to trust positively (such as participation and communication) or negatively (such as opportunistic behavior), the more the factor contributes to knowledge sharing correspondingly. The factors with no significant influence on trust (such as shared values and learning capacity) have no or less influence on knowledge sharing.

The empirical study is conducted on green supply chains, with data collected from Taiwan's green manufacturing firms. With the research model developed, cross‐industrial studies on various forms of supply chains can be conducted to investigate whether differences between supply chains exist about the role that trust plays in interorganizational knowledge sharing.

The findings of the paper provide useful insights into how supply chain members should reinforce their collaborative behaviors and activities that would enhance the trust‐based relationships, in order to achieve the competitive advantage of knowledge sharing for the supply chain as a whole.

The new research model developed allows the relationships between trust and other influencing factors on interorganizational knowledge sharing to be explored. The model reflects the coexistence of the cooperation and competition relationships between supply chain members, which is not dealt with in previous studies.

Relationship learning is viewed as an important factor in enhancing competitiveness and an important determinant of profitability in relationships. Prior studies have acknowledged the positive effects of interorganizational learning on performance, but the performance measures applied have varied. The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between interorganizational learning and different types of performance. The paper also goes beyond direct effects by investigating the moderating effects of different research designs.

This paper applies a meta-analytic approach to systematically analyze 21 independent studies (N = 4,618) to reveal the relationship between interorganizational learning and performance.

The findings indicate that interorganizational learning is an important predictor of performance, and that the effects of interorganizational learning on performance differ in magnitude under different research conditions.

The paper focuses on interorganizational learning, and during the data collection, some related topics were excluded from the data search to retain the focus on learning.

The study evinces the breadth of the field of interorganizational learning and how different research designs affect research results. Moreover, this meta-analysis indicates the need for greater clarity when defining the concepts used in studies and for definitions of the concepts applied in the field of interorganizational learning to be unified.

This study is the first to meta-analytically synthesize literature on interorganizational learning. It also illuminates new perspectives for future studies within this field.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the available insights regarding interorganizational network evolution. The research questions being addressed are as follows: What is the nature of interorganizational network evolution? And what causes interorganizational network evolution? The review hence focuses on the nature of interorganizational network evolution (at the ego-network level and whole-network level) and the causes of interorganizational network evolution (firm-related causes and environmental causes). This paper highlights relevant gaps in the existing literature on interorganizational network evolution while outlining a research agenda by identifying key research questions and issues requiring further scholarly contributions to stimulate research in this field.

An extensive review of scholarly peer-reviewed English language journal articles was conducted in the subject areas of economics, sociology, business and management (including entrepreneurship) while excluding articles in the domain areas of computer science that dealt with computer networks and the health field that addressed neural networks to obtain articles on interorganizational network evolution for the period 1970-2019. Various journal databases such as EBSCO, ScienceDirect (Elsevier), Emerald, JSTOR and ABI/INFORM and Ebook Central on ProQuest were used to extract relevant articles using specific keywords.

To better understand this phenomenon of interorganizational network evolution, there is a need for future studies to focus on the less researched areas such as the “nature of evolution” of EINR1, EINR3 and EINR4 and the “causes of evolution” of FRC3, FRC5, FRC7 and FRC8. Further, over the years, in comparison to the evolution of interorganizational network relationships (EINR), fewer works have considered the evolution of overall interorganizational network structure (EINS). The research studies on environmental causes (EC) have been less in number in comparison to firm related causes (FRC), and this could be an area for further research. Also, studies on interorganizational network evolution have not examined the impact of FRC1 on EINR 3 and only a few studies have examined the impact of FRC1 on EINR1 and EINR4. Less attention has been given to the impact of FRC2 on EINR1, EINR3, EINR4 and EINS. Additionally, the impact of FRC3 on EINR1, EINR3 and EINS needs more in-depth examination. The impact of FRC4 on EINR4; FRC5 on EINR1, EINR2 and EINR4; FRC6 on EINR1 and EINS; and FRC7 and FRC8 on all forms of “nature of interorganizational network evolution” requires more research work. Finally, the impact of EC on EINR3 and EINR4 is also a less researched stream in the literature needing more scholarly contribution to better understand the phenomenon under consideration in this study. Some of the least explored theoretical lenses and relevant questions that can be addressed using these lenses to advance research on network evolution have also been discussed.

The main contribution of this paper is that it provides a comprehensive literature review, collating the dispersed knowledge on interorganizational network evolution – nature of evolution and causes of evolution, identifying areas that require further research attention for the development of this domain.

The primary purpose of this study is to explore the antecedents of interorganizational trust within an international joint venture (IJV) context. In exploring how interorganizational trust is developed during the course of managing IJVs, we will look at fair action as a key factor in building interorganizational trust. Based on the existing literature, we propose the fair joint decision‐making process, cultural adaptation and the fair distribution of bargaining power as being antecedents of interorganizational trust within the IJV context. After developing hypotheses about the relationships between these three antecedents and interorganizational trust as well as causal relations between the antecedents, an empirical study is conducted using a sample comprised of 109 IJVs located in Korea. The findings show that perceived fairness in the joint decision‐making process and the distribution of bargaining power directly affects trust‐building between IJV participants; and also reveal the indirect effects of cultural adaptation on the development of interorganizational trust.

This paper aims to understand how managers of IT and information security aim to enhance information security and business continuity management in interorganizational IT relationships, such as outsourcing, cloud computing and interorganizational systems.

An explorative study of large multinational or local organizations operating in Finland was conducted. In total, 18 IT and information security managers were interviewed with semi‐structured questions.

First, the author discovered that several methods such as contracts, audits and standards were applied to balance power relationships between organizations or transfer responsibilities to other parties. The objectives of these methods are different within organizations. Second, the paper presents a comprehensive view of different security and continuity solutions in interorganizational IT relationships. The findings have practical value for IT managers and information security experts.

The interviews were conducted in different organizations. Therefore, it is suggested that a single in‐depth study that examines the phenomenon on different organizational levels within one organization would supplement the findings. Further studies on the power, trust and control balance of interorganizational IT relationships are required.

This paper builds on and expands information security and business continuity literature by illustrating that audits and standards play different roles in interorganizational IT relationships within organizations, and that contracts form the basis of those relationships. Information security problems and business continuity breaches caused by external partners and outsourcing vendors affect the reputation and value of the client company. Therefore, managers must have the means to ensure the continuity of operations.